Cato Converter

Back in OOTP 6.5 and earlier versions, a gentleman named Jeff Cato created a third-party utility for OOTP called Catobase. This tool allowed OOTP players to save a lot of historical information about their leagues that OOTP used to throw away after each season. OOTP now automatically creates and stores most of the information that Catobase originally had, so Jeff's utility is no longer needed. However, leagues that used Catobase needed a way to get that historical data into OOTP when they upgraded to more recent versions of OOTP. As a result, there is a utility called the Cato Converter within OOTP. This can be found on the League Functionsscreenin the Import/Export action menu.

If you don't know what Catobase is, then you should never have a need to use this function!

Cato Converter Caveat

Over the years that Catobase was in use, it did some seriously goofy things to handle different league configurations, especially when there were team name changes, etc. The Cato Converter is not perfect, but it is the best we could do considering that it was a third-party tool, and that Jeff Cato has pretty much disappeared. So, the Cato converter is available for use "as-is". At this time, we do not plan on further enhancing the Cato converter, especially since it pertains to a product of ours that is close to five years old now. We hope you understand!

What the Cato Importer Does

• Adds listings to your "Champions" screen for each season imported from Catobase.
• Updates the League History Index to list seasons and league champions for each imported season.
• Adds any missing players and statistics to the alphabetical Player Index and Batting / Pitching Registers.
• Imports any player batting, pitching, or fielding statistics that are not already in your OOTP database.
• Imports franchise information and statistics for all the teams in your league, so that the Team Index lists the earlier names/locations of all clubs and has complete years/record/championships information.
• Updates the career & regular season leaderboards as necessary (most to all of this information should have imported to OOTP2007 normally).
• Updates the positional career & regular season leaderboards with information from the Cato seasons (these were not tracked by OOTP prior to 2006, so you should see significant changes here).
• Expands the Award Winners list for the big four awards (Batter, Pitcher, Rookie, Fielder) to include all Catobase seasons.
• Creates annual index pages for each sub-league, with the Standings, World Series results, Batting and Pitching Stats, Award Winners, All-Stars, and leaderboards specific to that subleague and season.
• Generates complete Batting, Pitching and Fielding Registers for each sub-league by season.
• Sub-league Positional Leaderboards are created for each season.
• Creates the list of Rookies who debuted in each subleague for every season, and displays their career length and statistics on the page.
• Individual Team Index pages are created for each season, with full Batting, Pitching, and Fielding stats by position. Team Batting and Pitching Leaders for the season are displayed as well.
• The Positional and Pitching Starters pages are updated to include listings for all Catobase seasons.
• The team-specific Batting and Pitching Registers are updated as necessary, including summary statistics at the top of thescreenfor every season.
• The team-specific Batting and Pitching Leaderboards are also updated as necessary.
• Player pages should already have batting / pitching statistics, but any that are missing are filled in, and career fielding stats (which were not stored by OOTP6) are added as well.

What the Cato Importer Doesn't Do

• Import any data from Catobase not already supported by OOTP, such as Win Shares, Similarity Scores, the Ink Tests and the Hall of Fame Standards.
• Import any Human Manager information from Catobase.
• Add any information to the team- or league-level Drafted Players pages.
• Display Wild Card Round or League Championships results on the annual sub-league Statistics & Leaders pages (only World Series are displayed).
• Team payrolls are not displayed on the annual team indexes.
• The updates to the Champions screen do not include the roster information normally displayed on the right side of the screen (only the team/record information shown above the trophy image is present).
• In rare, sporadic instances, some players listed on the Awards pages have their summary statistics displayed as zeroes (correct information is always present on the individual player pages, however).
• Award information for additional or "custom" awards ( i.e., for anything beyond the standard MVP/Cy/Gold Glove configuration) is not imported.
• In some instances, OOTP is parsing teams with multi-word names incorrectly (e.g. a player's stat line for a season might indicate that he played for a team called the "Rays" in the city of "Tampa Bay Devil"). Where this occurs, however, the effect is purely cosmetic: the players' statistics are still correct, and he still appears on the correct team's roster.

Instructions for Using the Importer

1. Back up your league! We strongly recommend that you test the converter on a "copy" of your league before using it with the "real thing". There are two reasons for this. First, once you import Cato data into a league you cannot do it again - you'll end up with doubled data and statistics in a lot of places if you try that. Second, given the various work-arounds and edits that many leagues performed on Catobase to get it work with newer versions of OOTP once Jeff Cato stopped updating the program, several of the leagues used during testing displayed unique "errors" in their Cato data that needed to be manually adjusted before the import would work completely correctly.
2. Download and install Ryan W's Cato-to-CSV Converter.
3. When you run the Converter, the first thing you will need to do is click "Settings", and point the program to both your Cato database (the file with the .mdb extension) and the directory you want it to output the CSV files to. Once that's done, click "Generate Lahman Files".
4. Check that output directory. You should have 10 .csv files: AllStars, AwardsPlayers, Batting, Fielding, HallOfFame, Master, Pitching, SeriesPost, Teams and TeamsFranchises. As long as those are there, keep going.
5. Load your league in OOTP8. Those who are looking to apply their data to an OOTP2007 league can simply copy/paste their .lg folder from the OOTP2007 save directory to the OOTP8 one; the two versions are completely compatible (and if you want to run the league in OOTP2007 again after importing the data, you can just copy/paste it back). If your league is still using OOTP6 or 2006, you will need to Import your league into OOTP8 using the appropriate option on the OOTP8 main screen.
6. Before importing your Cato data, go to the Options & Ballpark screen for each team in your league. Here you will see that a field has been added called "Historical Franchise ID". In this field put the team abbreviation (BOS, NYA, ATL, etc.) of the city this team was located in during the first season you used Catobase. So if you had a team in Brooklyn when you started using Catobase that has since moved to Los Angeles, the Historical Franchise ID is most likely BRO. Abbreviations entered here must match the ones that exist in the file TeamFranchises.csv. If the team has never moved, then the Historical Franchise ID is the same as the current team abbreviation (in that case, you don't really need to fill it in, but it can't hurt). Remember to press "Enter" after filling in each field.
7. To import your Cato data, go to Game --> Game Setup, select the League Setup tab, click the Import/Export button at the bottom of the Functions tab and select "Import Cato History". OOTP will ask you to point it to the Master.csv file that you created in Step #3.
8. And that should do it. Once OOTP has finished importing the data it will automatically save the database. Where things like statistics have been added or updated, you can view them all in each player's profile, but the most direct way to view all the additions is simply to browse through your league's History section.

Possible Troubleshooting Issues/Suggestions

Hopefully no one has need of this section, as we think we've got the importer working pretty darned well (and compensating automatically for every difficulty we came across) at this point. But given the possibility of unforeseen errors in someone's Cato data, here are a couple of the more common issues we encountered during testing, along with what you can do it fix the problem if it occurs:

1. Franchises not connecting properly on your Team Index, and/or still-active Franchises showing up under "Inactive Franchises" at the bottom of the page.
   
   The converter uses two files, TeamFranchises.csv and Teams.csv to create the links between clubs. TeamFranchises is typically a short file that should contain one line for every original franchise in your league. For instance, if your league started with a team in Boston that later moved to Atlanta, TeamFranchises should have a line for Boston, but not for Atlanta. So the first thing to check is that TeamFranchises does, indeed, have an entry for the original edition of every franchise in your league (if your league expanded at any point, then there should be any entry for the first location of each expansion franchise). The third column in that file contains either a Y or N. If the franchise is still active, it should be a Y (unless your league has contracted, every franchise should still be active).
   
   Second, Teams.csv contains a list of stats for every team in the league, broken down by season. The third column is the current team abbreviation, but the fourth column is for the Franchise ID - in other words, it should match an entry in TeamFranchises.csv. Using that same Boston-Atlanta example, columns three and fourth should both be "BOS" initially, but when the team moved to Atlanta, only the third column should change. The Franchise ID has to stay the same, so you'd see ATL in column three and BOS in column four from then on.
   
   
2. A player's batting, pitching, or fielding stats on his playerscreenappear to be associated with the wrong team for one or more seasons.
   
   The stat information is drawn directly from Batting.csv, Pitching.csv or Fielding.csv, logically enough. These files contain one line per season per player. The first column is the player's ID in Catobase. If you aren't sure which one matches the player in question, you can cross reference a real name to a Cato ID using the Master.csv file. Once you've identified the correct player, locate the line in Batting/Pitching/Fielding.csv for the season in error. The fourth column in the file is for the team he played for that year. Correcting that column for each season that is in error should resolve any problems along these lines.
   
   Note: as mentioned above, Cato data cannot be imported into the same league multiple times. If you do encounter a problem and need to re-do the import, you need to erase the copy of the league you're working with and start with a "fresh" copy of your league from OOTP6/2007.
   
   
3. League champions appear on the wrong side of the League History Index page, and/or the links on thisscreengo to the wrong sub-league.
   
   The rows in Teams.csv need to be sorted in a particular way in order for the league history index to generate properly. Open Teams.csv and sort the information first by season, and then by sub-league so that the listings for your Sub-League 1 (the one that customarily appears on the left side of your screen in OOTP) always come before the listings for Sub-League 2. For example, using a typical MLB setup, you would need to make sure that your list of AL teams for a season always appears before the list of NL teams for that same season.
   
   

Kudos

Some quick "thank yous" regarding this utility:

• to Jeff Cato, for his great utility
• to Ryan W., who wrote the application that exports Cato data into a format Markus could use
• to Markus, for the obvious
• to Kaitiaki, for doing all of the dirty work in writing most of this post
• to everyone else who helped get the Cato converter as good as it is!

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